quarta-feira, 30 de junho de 2010

(Ok, I have to admit that it's hard to post thesehumble creations on the same pages that host poets like Sandra Cisneros and Denise Duhamel, butwhat the hell, it may be my only chance...)

Quilting (for N and D)

though we use the same threadsand choose our patches from the same moundthere is still some need toexplain the design, make explicitthe meaning, the final picture.

so, i turn myself inside out for you, solike a garment you can see my seams and myrough edges, whatever there is to turn andrun from, whatever there is that can melt intosome small kindness

into the dusk,there’s tapering, cutting –here the snipped thread is already too short,a story that can’t be finished, a versionnipped in the bud,but there, you see, is another stringto be pulled from the undersideand we’ll just keep at it-sewing and mending as if lifecould go on forever, a bit of frayedfabric like a warning: betterlift up your head and get on with things, my girl!

terça-feira, 29 de junho de 2010

Because she is the most popular dollof the twentieth century, Barbieis buried in a time capsule in Philadelphiaon July 4, 1976. She is scrunched between an empty KentuckyFried Chicken bucket and a full Coca- Cola can. She’s become a cultural icon and now she has to pay the price. She remembers a timewhen just a few girls knew herand she didn´t have to put on such airs.Now a full-fledged collectible, she has to make sureevery hair is always in place. I’ve just been votedBest Personality, a superlative category in our junior high yearbook. I’m able to pose for a picture with the cute Best Personality boy,the first and only football player to ever ask me on a date.He says he wants to go steady with me and another girl at the same time. I don’t think it’s fair but being the Best Personality girl,it takes me a long time to say that.You see, it’s turned out that although I’m too oldto still play with fashion dolls, they’ve somehow become implantedin my subconscious. I don’t look anything like Barbie so maybe I don’t deserve a boyfriend of my own. And to make things worse, in my mind, my rival resembles Barbie quite a bitWhen I finally write the Best Personality boy an angry note, flustered, I slip it between the slots of the wrong locker. The nobody boy who finds it won’t give it back, even when I ask him politely.Soon everyone will know I’m not always in a good mood.Fearing a scandal, I ask advice of the Best Dressed and Most Likely to Succeed.They say they don’t care what the masses think –and though I sense they’re not telling the truth-suddenly it doesn’t matter if my class takes my Best Personality honor away or not.At least I know I’m better off than that one repressed Bicentennial Barbiewho’ll be stuck in that stuffy time capsuleuntil the year 2076. Maybewhen she finally comes out, the pressurewill have been too much. Maybe she’ll be able, like me,to express herself. Maybe she’ll wink at the Coca-Cola canbefore they both shake, explode, make a mess.

quarta-feira, 23 de junho de 2010

In Brazil, where post-modern freedoms, highly unequal opportunity structures and much discursive ambivalence regarding feminism produce a complex scenario for gender politics and change, the horsewomen I have interviewed over the course of the years see themselves as unconventional, openly or covertly challenging customs and norms that attempt to impose meanings of womanhood on everyone.*

On the other hand, the riding women I interviewed in Spain (Barcelona and Andalucía), especially those of the younger generations, tended not to see their activities in this sporting field as anything that made them stand out from other countrywomen. The patriarchal past that threw innumerous obstacles in the path of women’s choices and public sphere roles and activities is portrayed as largely overcome or surpassed. In fact, when I asked them a question that usually elicited an assertion of “difference” from Brazilian equestriennes, my Spanish interviewees would look at me with perplexity and often ask me to explain what I meant. “Different from others?? Braver than others?? No, we are all like this today”** was the response I got from one quite successful young Andalusian horsewoman - herself the only woman on a prominent equestrian team – after I had had my chance to clarify my admittedly tendentious query.

In the history of Western modernity, the passage from the Victorian or romantic era in which women were viewed as sexless bearers of a natural “virtuous” proclivity toward abnegation, service and love (but not sex) to a “post-modernity” in which ambiguous messages about women’s bodies and sexualities abound, new forms of social control emerge which, we could argue, take advantage of such ambiguities. The most difficult and paradoxical aspect of this situation is that it involves, or tends to generate, considerable complicity from women themselves, who so often desire to be exactly what contemporary hegemonic discourses tell them they should (must) be.

Some non-Western histories, it seems, have quite a different point of departure. Mounira Charrad and Fatima Mernissi have written about how traditional Islamic notions of women as sexual and dangerous underlie the institutional constructions of the “walls and veils” that are meant as material and symbolic barriers to the spaces and places where they would come into contact with men outside the closest kin circles. Western discourse has thus seized the opportunity to construct a simplifying dichotomy of “western freedoms” vs. “non-western bondage”, which – for all I have stated above and many other things that I need not repeat here – is at best, highly contentious. At any rate, as women around the non-Western world struggle to build their own idioms of emancipation - which include elements shared with Western feminism as well as particular, contextual ones – it should come as no surprise that some continue to include headscarves and protectively modest forms of bodily exposure.

*In recent (forthcoming) work, I have tried to show some of the ways in which women involved in different arenas of equestrian sport construct discourses on the body, on subjectivity and identity that pose a challenge to conventional ‘technologies of gender’, de-emphasizing historical notions of delicate, maternal or otherwise “controllable” female bodies and emphasizing such elements as strength and courage in facing risk and adventure - in ways which are radical enough to take them beyond accepted normative paths. Coupled with my informants’ discourse of physical competence, skill and bravery, was a relative lack of (openly expressed) concern for bodily appearance/perfection. ** This coincides with anthropologist Sara Pink’s comments emerging from her work on Spanish women bullfighters: “… a woman’s performance represents a statement about female body-use and body-image. The performance must be seen as a ritual statement about these notions of the female body through which it is relocated in a new position in society and culture -both physically in the bullring and metaphorically. The new body use symbolizes a new body-relationship to the rest of society by which the female body stands for not a reproducing body, but a publicly proven, physically fit body, and a successful, ‘dominating’ body."